Yes, the Everquest 2 engine is more advanced than 90% of the MMOs on the market but watching this trailer just rammed home the point that an engine is nothing without a good art team behind it. I'm not going to apologise to SOE for the following but Everquest 2 is ugly with a capital UG. Yes it has lovely shadows. Yes it has some nice bump mapping going on but dear God it is an offence to my eyes.

The character designs are soulless and the environments unappealing. In this day of high end video cards pushing polygons like nobody's business, seeing Everquest 2 in action really forces the point that a graphics engine is akin to an artists palette and paint brush. Anyone can use them but it takes talent to produce something that we would call art.

Continuing the MMO theme - although this discussion is by no means exclusive to this genre - games like EVE Online and World of Warcraft have comparatively weak graphics engines but produce work that is infinitely more appealing.

EVE, as it stands, will run on some fairly rudimentary hardware but even on the most basic of setups the game provides visual landscapes that are second to none. Simply take a look at the following screenshot and compare it to the Everquest 2 screenshot that follows.



You don't need to have a Masters in art appreciation to see that while EVE may be deficient technically the art team behind it are vastly more talented than those ladies and gents working on Everquest 2.

As alluded to earlier, it isn't just MMOs that show this truth about visual design in gaming. Grim Fandango is a very primitive game technically but the art behind Tim Schaffer's opus is still some of the best seen on PC screens.

More recently Dreamfall put some absolutely stunning images on our monitors and did it all with an engine that barely pushed the Xbox let alone a high end PC.

So next time you go forking out $700+ on one of ATi's or nVidia's latest high end pixel crunchers be sure to remember that art is more than the palette used to create it. It is the skill of the artist making use of these graphics engines that ultimately makes or breaks the visual experience we see in our games.